


life is just a classroom

by garden of succulents (staranise)



Series: ain't licked yet [5]
Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Baking as a Coping Mechanism, Disability, Domesticity, Gen, Kent socializing with the SMH, Kent thinking about what to do after hockey, Major Character Injury
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-01
Updated: 2016-08-01
Packaged: 2018-07-28 15:25:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7646542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/staranise/pseuds/garden%20of%20succulents
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Last week Bitty Tweeted an especially good picture of the Sunday study session, pie on the wood table and Dex and Whiskey bent over a book, with lighting that managed to make it look all soft and peaceful. Kent had replied, “Jelly, wish I could be there.” </p><p>“So come next week!” Bitty’d replied, and on Wednesday he got a DM: “were u serious about Sunday? Jack says he wouldn’t mind.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	life is just a classroom

**Author's Note:**

> _Ain't Licked Yet_ is a series being written irregularly and out-of-order, about Kent Parson's career-ending injury and what happened after.

Last week Bitty Tweeted an especially good picture of the Sunday study session, pie on the wood table and Dex and Whiskey bent over a book, with lighting that managed to make it look all soft and peaceful.  Kent had replied, “Jelly, wish I could be there.”  “So come next week!” Bitty’d replied, and on Wednesday he got a DM: “were u serious about Sunday? Jack says he wouldn’t mind.”

Hospitality is in Bitty’s blood, but on the other hand, he’d assumed that if he gave a schedule of, “First pie’s in the oven around 10, it’s busiest around 2 in the afternoon,” then a man from New York would arrive around lunchtime, not at _nine-thirty am_  when Bitty’s still in his pyjamas and bathrobe, and looks out the window of his room to see a car pull up at the curb.

Frantic, he bolts downstairs and picks the pail of sand off the porch, scattering it down the icy walk all the way until he meets Kent, who’s levering himself and his cane out of the car.  “Oh gosh, I’m so sorry,” he’s babbling, “I was gonna check the walk before, I didn’t think I’d see you this early, all this darn _ice_ , we usually salt it but the temperature’s just been so low, and–”

Kent’s just smiling at him, free hand in his pocket.  His breath steams out of his mouth.  “Good to see you,” he says.  “Sorry to surprise you.”

He opens his arm a little and Bitty steps in carefully, trying not to knock against the cane planted at Kent’s side; Kent leans in and his arm is briefly tight across Bitty’s back, but it’s a very precise hug.  When he lets go Bitty turns and says, “Maria, right?”  He shakes hands with the woman he’s seen on Snapchat, who’s trying to burrow into her scarf, so then he steps back to let them up the walk.

Maria stands next to Kent with her elbow cocked and he takes it like a girl with her prom date, relying on her for support and balance while he picks his way down the sanded ice.  The two steps up to the porch demand all of their joint concentration; Kent has to ground both feet on each step before he moves up.  Bitty belatedly realizes he should hold the door open, and scrambles to it; he has to hand the screen door off to Maria, and hold the main one himself.

“In the kitchen?” Kent asks, after stamping his feet of snow, and Bitty points; Maria hands Kent off a foot away from one of the tall chairs at the wooden table, then takes his cane and props it up in the corner.  She hangs the backpack she’s carrying off the back of his chair.  He gives her a thumbs up and says, “Tell your sister hi for me.”  She smiles and gives him a thumbs up back, then waves to Bitty and leaves, shutting the doors behind her and heading off down the walk.  Kent leans back in his chair and turns to Bitty.  “Really didn’t mean to surprise you.  We came up last night, rented an AirBnB five minutes from here. If I travel, I pretty much have to crash for a couple hours.  So I got up early this morning, you know?”

“Gosh no, don’t worry, I can’t believe you went to all the effort,” Bitty says, shaken out of his frozen watchful hovering.  “It’s good to see you, can I start some coffee for you?  I just had a hardboiled egg for breakfast but I can get something on in just a moment.  Oh! Let me take your coat, you’re gonna be boiling in that thing–”

Kent hands over his coat but he’s laughing silently, his face all scrunched up.  “You sound like somebody’s grandmother,” he says.  “Have you even showered yet?”

Bitty puts his hands on his hips.  “It’s my aspiration in life.  Coffee, or do you need something without caffeine?  I can put the kettle on, but we’ve also got orange juice and a couple different kinds of Coke…”

Kent shoves himself off the chair, standing with one hand on the table.  “I can make my own coffee.  You go finish what you were up to before I got here.”  He crosses the kitchen in three limping strides, fetching up at the counter and using it to support himself.

“Oh no, I can do it,” Bitty says, fetching the coffee can down with the box of filters, and anxiously adds as he rummages for a mug, “It’s not that I think you can’t, but you’re a guest, and–”

Kent gives him a perfectly level look that is so reasonable and long-suffering Bitty instinctively takes a step back.  “I can work a coffeemaker,” he says.  “If you’re not letting me cook in this kitchen you’re ruining the whole reason I came up here.”

“Oh, well.”  Bitty fidgets his hands for just a minute as Kent opens the coffeemaker and pulls out the grounds tray.  “Here,” he says, reaching out and gesturing with the other hand to the garbage by the back door, “I’ll–”  Kent hands them over and sets the carafe in the sink so he can fill it up with water as Bitty dumps out the grounds.  “I find six-to-eight is a good water-to-coffee ratio,” he blurts out.

“Got it,” Kent agrees, taking back the tray and putting a new filter in it.  “You go get dressed.”

Bitty stares at his back for a minute, fidgeting more, then turns to the door.  He’s halfway up the stairs before he turns back for the kitchen so he can pop his head around the door and say, “The sugarbowl’s in–”

Kent, who has already located the sugarbowl, turns around and points at him with a very patient expression.  He gestures upstairs with a swoop his wrist.

“All right, going!” Bitty says, and makes himself leave Kent in the kitchen.

* * *

While remaining in the chair at the table Kent very competently performs a lot of the work for the pies, mixing dough and rolling out crust.  While they work Bitty puts on a Spotify station Kent linked him to the other week that he’s been listening to ever since, and the two of them horrify Dex by singing along to it.  After a couple hours of work Kent has to take a few pills, then ask Nursey to pass his cane over so he can hobble to the couch and lie down on it with a scarf over his face; after about twenty minutes the incipient migraine has gone down to a low ebb and he comes back into the kitchen.

It’s interesting to catch a glimpse into the lives of the students who are gathered around the table.  Kent listens to murmurs of Pascal and Mac naming the bones of the hand one by one, leafs through a photocopied essay on the politics of poetry when Nursey’s done highlighting it, takes a picture of Dex’s book on pre-Columbian societies to look up later after he’s devoured two chapters of it in a sitting.  When Bitty finishes handwriting a page of his French assignment Kent takes it and starts proofing his grammar errors.

He used to pity Jack for having this, for having to put up with this.  Kent Parson had been the luckiest person alive, _No more pencils, no more books._   He’d left school at 17 and never looked back, never had the misfortune to have to work at any job but “professional hockey player”; he’d moved straight from his allowance to a stipend.  Jack’s history degree, his college team full of mediocre players whose playing careers would dead-end here, had seemed like a self-inflicted exercise in suffering before the real part of Jack’s life could begin.  When Kent had showed up to offer Jack a spot on the Aces, he’d thought he was springing a buddy from jail.

Most of the time when he finds any way he’s changed or grown as a person since his accident, he immediately jumps into beating himself up: _Yeah, because you were a dipshit then and you’ve learned better too late for your life to be ruined.  What a pity none of it matters because everything is worthless now._   And he was afraid that’s what coming back to Samwell would be for him, like some shitty consolation prize at the cost of everything that’s really mattered.  But… for all the things he’s fucked up here, he knows that there was a time _before_  the accident, _before_  his life ended, when he’d been to Samwell and glimpsed what it was like to be a student here, with fascinating books and teammates like brothers, and felt jealous of Bitty, of Jack.  When he’d thought, _I kind of wish I could do this too._

It maybe feels like the first time he’d ever found a place that made him think that if his career ended, his life wouldn’t be over.  So he’s come back.


End file.
